A top Republican today tried to link the defunct community organizing group ACORN to the Occupy Wall Street movement, demanding that one of Acorn’s successors be investigated for “fraud” for allegedly raising money for other causes and giving it to the protesters.

But while former leaders of ACORN say they support the Occupy movement and played a role in organizing a rally in support of it last month, they dismiss House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s charges that they’re behind it as wishful thinking.

“I’d like to say this was our idea and we had something to do with it, but we didn’t,” New York Communities for Change executive director Jon Kest told POLITICO. “It’s coming from a totally different place – it’s a different constituency than we tend to organize. It’s just tapping into something we knew was there in the communities we work in, but we didn’t necessarily know it was something that existed all throughout society.”

“We have never given any money to Occupy Wall Street,” he said of Issa’s specific charge, first reported by Fox News, that money donated for other causes had been funneled to the “Occupy” movement. “It’s just absurd.”

And indeed, the most striking fact about the “Occupy” movement isn’t the involvement of post-Acorn groups like New York Communities for Change, but its growth outside the old structures of the left. While some on the right would love to link ACORN to Occupy more directly, given the defunct organization’s perennial power as a favorite conservative target, ACORN’s old supporters, and the organizing groups trying to rebuild from its ashes say it collapsed in part for a lack of allies outside its base in low-income, minority communities - the key constituencies of Occupy.

“Had there been something like this before 2008, a movement redefining what some of the issues are nationally, ACORN would probably not have gone down,” speculated John Atlas, the author of a recent, sympathetic history of the defunct community organizing group, “Seeds of Change.” ACORN collapsed amid a conservative assault, he said, because it had grown so reliant on institutions to which the Occupy movement has few ties.

“They were all getting money from corporations and big foundations,” he said. “If you’re getting money from corporations , big foundations, and even the government, it’s hard to attack them.”

New York Communities for Change, which occupies the city’s old ACORN offices and is run by its former officials, became the target of conservative scrutiny when Fox News reported that the group “is playing a key role in the self-proclaimed ‘leaderless’ Occupy Wall Street movement.”

The report included what people involved in the group say are some accurate details: They have organized rallies for a “Millionaires Tax” for the better part of a year, and have worked with the “Occupy” movement on the subject. NYCC also served as a hub for organizing a large, labor union-backed rally in support of Occupy Wall Street, and its members – typically poor and minority New Yorkers who pay dues to the group – and staffers had attended the event.

Aside from Fox’s negative gloss on the group’s involvement, the main dispute is over whether money raised canvassing for other causes or paid protesters were shipped to the Occupy movement, which both Kest and Occupy participants have denied.

“We have a full-time staff of organizers. Their job is to work with our membership and involve us in campaigns and issues,” Kest said. “Does that mean they sometimes go to rallies with them? Of course, in a staff supporting role.”

But Kest stressed that “there is no ACORN” and said that the new group has played only a supporting role. He’d been vaguely aware of emails mentioning the original, September 17 protest, but “wasn’t paying that much attention to it.”

“They had a whole set of plannning meetings we weren’t invited to,” said Kest. “The first thing we did was organizae a rally on October 5. It was our view that here was something real that they were tapping into and we wanted to be part of all that,” he said.

Dan Cantor, the executive director of New York’s Working Families Party, a longtime ally of the defunct group, told a similar story.

“I saw it on day three or so and thought, ‘This looks kind of modest,’ ” he said. “I can claim no perspicacity here.”

Cantor said he thought it would be the latest in a long line of New York City protests that passed unnoticed.

“What was different here was that like in Madison, Wisconsin and in Tahrir Square, it was staying day after day that made it pop a bit – and add into that a little police over-reaction, young people with some verve and creativity, and a message that totally gets the zeitgeist,” he said.

New York isn’t the only place the former ACORN groups have sought ties with the Occupy movement. In Chicago, Action Now – which split with Acorn during an internal feud in 2008, unrelated to the group’s eventual collapse – drew Occupy protesters into an October 11 protest against Bank of America, and has seen staff and members attend Occupy marches, said Action Now’s Madeline Talbot.

“We feel pretty broadly that Occupy is in the same spirit as Action Now,” she said.